I'm guessing it's not just me, but I've been quite bored of what this game has to offer. Prepare yourselves because I'm about to rant about opinions, but these opinions are from observations so stick around if you want to, otherwise, TLDR at the bottom. I've been around since maybe 2015, back when the game was a single purchase for $60. Back before the break into horizons (which cost an additional $30, by the way), and obviously before odyssey (yet another $30). Between that and the cosmetics I've dropped about $150 on this game, which is fine. I need to emphasize that, that's my choice. What's not fine is how absolutely mitigated progression is for the road map that is elite dangerous.
It's like a stuck up restaurant: you pay some ridiculous sum for a fancy dish that consists of an apple slice, a chocolate chip, a teaspoon of peanut butter, and a drizzle of carmel syrup most of which isn't even on the 'food'. Then the dessert; an update highlighting a single sprinkle on a platter the size of the table with some powdered sugar on and around it. That's it, sugar coated sugar. It's all the same. No update introduces any new and exciting mechanics to the game. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last actual entertaining update to the game was engineering simply because it allowed actual customization to a ship and its modules but even that's fallen short because there is a clear course of approach, a "right way", to do things. No one in their right mind is going to bring an ASP scout with cannons engineered for short range to a fight. This is because cannons are 100% outclassed by every other weapon, short range has zero benefits over overcharged on projectile weapons, and because the asp scout blows as a ship.
Clear and obvious balance issues aside, where is the variety? You're telling me humanity has access to alien tech, reverse engineered it, mastered space flight, and become a galaxy spanning civilization, all in the span of 300 years, and developed no more than thirty eight vehicle to traverse all of the galaxy? And in that time of endless conflict, the very crucible from which mankind was forged, we've got literally twenty weapon systems, some of which are literally just copy/paste versions of others. Worse yet, some of these things are TOTALLY USELESS. Enzyme missile racks, flechette launchers, dumbfire missiles, cannons, burst lasers, torpedos, mines... I mean, the only way those things are useful is if you use them so wrong the target simply doesn't expect it.
The missions are all the same. They're not even procedurally generated. They are ALL THE SAME THING with the same rewards rebranded by factions that offer and accomplish absolutely nothing. An assassinate mission, assuming it even works at all, will consist of a terrible pilot in a corvette/cutter/anaconda that and literally be rammed to death at no expense to yourself. Unless of course you're in a wing, at which point the enemy is a der-de-lance and three vultures 100% of the time. The same thing applies to wetwork, deserter, mining, transport, data delivery, every mission available is the same stale gameplay with the same outcome. Even thargoid combat, if you beat one you can beat them all. What's the point? There's only so much money that's useful that the grind simply becomes a session of begging for entertainment.
Well there's an entire galaxy to explore, right? Sure, billions of systems, billions of, you guessed it, exactly the same thing over and over. Oh look, a white star. Oh, a blue one. Look at that, two of them! Oh bonus, a neutron star. It's quite bad when the holy grail of exploration is literally a planet that looks just like earth, is called "earthlike", and you can't even touch the thing. That's it, it's there, onwards to the next system of exactly the same thing. The planets you can land on are all the same retextured experience that have absolutely nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience, and only vary in size, color, gravity, and lighting. It's like No Mans Sky without the added interaction of plant and animal life on the barron rocks you choose to touch down on. Seriously, it's all the boring parts of something that should be wildly entertaining in a nearly infinite galaxy. Even worse is how the scientific knowledge we have actually accumulated hasn't transferred over to the game. A large majority of the known stars in the universe are either not labeled in game, totally wrong, or both. The visuals of nebulae are totally wrong and planets are just completely backwards. Take our solar system for example. We've know what pluto looks like for the better part of 7 years now, almost a decade. Why is it not only off-limits, but a white ball? And why is Charon perfectly round and the one of the two that we CAN land on? You would thing frontier would be all over that when it was all the craze but no, they had additions no one asked for to work on.
I'm not even gonna say too much about the shoot-em-up disguised as a space flight simulator known as odyssey. We asked to walk around on the ships we fly and instead that's the one place you can't walk. What a spit in the face. It's the single grindiest experience I have ever partaken of and the only thing it does is aid in furthering the grind. I've found it easier and more entertaining to avoid walking around all together. It's boring, pointless, and unnecessary. A spectacular waste of time and misuse of content development for a flop of a game mode in the space flight simulator.
The base gameplay itself is growing dull. I'm probably just sour, but warping from place to place at faster-than-light velocities was fun at first, but after the 100th time the visuals and mechanics just got boring, after the 1000th I really just avoid it. Again, we've mastered FTL travel and can pop lightyears between stars but it can take literal hours to get between system destinations. It seems the best way to play the game is to not even play it. Auto-undock, supercruise assist, play a bit of actual game, supercruise assist, auto-dock, repeat. The entertainment of the game is in the combat. Nobody play ED for the trade and smuggling (totally worthless profession, by the way. Some risk, zero reward). Exploration can be pretty at times, but you gotta want that view real bad cause you're gonna have to hunt for it. At the end of the day, we strap into our crash couch and warm up the guns because the only entertainment for miles is the unpredictability of PVP. Only there's no one around and the people who are on use nothing but FDLs and cutters because, again, there is simply a right way to do things and again the only variance is the people doing it comically wrong to challenge themselves or for a laugh.
What I don't understand is how a game can be around for as long as ED has, have the same funding ED has, have the development team ED has, and lack SO MUCH gameplay. This really feels like a skeletal structure of a game that should be in "alpha' for years like star citizen. It's mind-boggling how the updates can be a year apart and introduce next to nothing and require three or four patches to fix the things they broke in the process and fix the bugs that arose from the patch for the patch. The solution is simple: add ships, add weapons, add modules, for **** sake introduce class 3 and 4 railguns. Increase the variety. Introduce specialized ships and modules/weapons that are specialized versions of what already exists if you insist on being lazy. Put NPCs on planets outside of the bubble, generate actual AI to fight and interact with. Don't say it can't be done, modders for space engineers code it for free from their bedrooms. There is a whole pile of EASY EASY crap that could be tapped into but frontier simply refuses to play along and instead insists on polishing that turd of a FPS in the spaceship game. Don't get me wrong, the game is still somewhat fun, but I can only find myself playing with a friend and even then we only ever get an hour or so in before we're off to elsewhere.
/Rant
TL,DR: Game is a senior citizen, lacks any and all variety despite this, easily remedied. Updates and patches introduce more bugs than orkin could handle, outweighing content in totality. Add some fekking ships and bits and guns please.
It's like a stuck up restaurant: you pay some ridiculous sum for a fancy dish that consists of an apple slice, a chocolate chip, a teaspoon of peanut butter, and a drizzle of carmel syrup most of which isn't even on the 'food'. Then the dessert; an update highlighting a single sprinkle on a platter the size of the table with some powdered sugar on and around it. That's it, sugar coated sugar. It's all the same. No update introduces any new and exciting mechanics to the game. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last actual entertaining update to the game was engineering simply because it allowed actual customization to a ship and its modules but even that's fallen short because there is a clear course of approach, a "right way", to do things. No one in their right mind is going to bring an ASP scout with cannons engineered for short range to a fight. This is because cannons are 100% outclassed by every other weapon, short range has zero benefits over overcharged on projectile weapons, and because the asp scout blows as a ship.
Clear and obvious balance issues aside, where is the variety? You're telling me humanity has access to alien tech, reverse engineered it, mastered space flight, and become a galaxy spanning civilization, all in the span of 300 years, and developed no more than thirty eight vehicle to traverse all of the galaxy? And in that time of endless conflict, the very crucible from which mankind was forged, we've got literally twenty weapon systems, some of which are literally just copy/paste versions of others. Worse yet, some of these things are TOTALLY USELESS. Enzyme missile racks, flechette launchers, dumbfire missiles, cannons, burst lasers, torpedos, mines... I mean, the only way those things are useful is if you use them so wrong the target simply doesn't expect it.
The missions are all the same. They're not even procedurally generated. They are ALL THE SAME THING with the same rewards rebranded by factions that offer and accomplish absolutely nothing. An assassinate mission, assuming it even works at all, will consist of a terrible pilot in a corvette/cutter/anaconda that and literally be rammed to death at no expense to yourself. Unless of course you're in a wing, at which point the enemy is a der-de-lance and three vultures 100% of the time. The same thing applies to wetwork, deserter, mining, transport, data delivery, every mission available is the same stale gameplay with the same outcome. Even thargoid combat, if you beat one you can beat them all. What's the point? There's only so much money that's useful that the grind simply becomes a session of begging for entertainment.
Well there's an entire galaxy to explore, right? Sure, billions of systems, billions of, you guessed it, exactly the same thing over and over. Oh look, a white star. Oh, a blue one. Look at that, two of them! Oh bonus, a neutron star. It's quite bad when the holy grail of exploration is literally a planet that looks just like earth, is called "earthlike", and you can't even touch the thing. That's it, it's there, onwards to the next system of exactly the same thing. The planets you can land on are all the same retextured experience that have absolutely nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience, and only vary in size, color, gravity, and lighting. It's like No Mans Sky without the added interaction of plant and animal life on the barron rocks you choose to touch down on. Seriously, it's all the boring parts of something that should be wildly entertaining in a nearly infinite galaxy. Even worse is how the scientific knowledge we have actually accumulated hasn't transferred over to the game. A large majority of the known stars in the universe are either not labeled in game, totally wrong, or both. The visuals of nebulae are totally wrong and planets are just completely backwards. Take our solar system for example. We've know what pluto looks like for the better part of 7 years now, almost a decade. Why is it not only off-limits, but a white ball? And why is Charon perfectly round and the one of the two that we CAN land on? You would thing frontier would be all over that when it was all the craze but no, they had additions no one asked for to work on.
I'm not even gonna say too much about the shoot-em-up disguised as a space flight simulator known as odyssey. We asked to walk around on the ships we fly and instead that's the one place you can't walk. What a spit in the face. It's the single grindiest experience I have ever partaken of and the only thing it does is aid in furthering the grind. I've found it easier and more entertaining to avoid walking around all together. It's boring, pointless, and unnecessary. A spectacular waste of time and misuse of content development for a flop of a game mode in the space flight simulator.
The base gameplay itself is growing dull. I'm probably just sour, but warping from place to place at faster-than-light velocities was fun at first, but after the 100th time the visuals and mechanics just got boring, after the 1000th I really just avoid it. Again, we've mastered FTL travel and can pop lightyears between stars but it can take literal hours to get between system destinations. It seems the best way to play the game is to not even play it. Auto-undock, supercruise assist, play a bit of actual game, supercruise assist, auto-dock, repeat. The entertainment of the game is in the combat. Nobody play ED for the trade and smuggling (totally worthless profession, by the way. Some risk, zero reward). Exploration can be pretty at times, but you gotta want that view real bad cause you're gonna have to hunt for it. At the end of the day, we strap into our crash couch and warm up the guns because the only entertainment for miles is the unpredictability of PVP. Only there's no one around and the people who are on use nothing but FDLs and cutters because, again, there is simply a right way to do things and again the only variance is the people doing it comically wrong to challenge themselves or for a laugh.
What I don't understand is how a game can be around for as long as ED has, have the same funding ED has, have the development team ED has, and lack SO MUCH gameplay. This really feels like a skeletal structure of a game that should be in "alpha' for years like star citizen. It's mind-boggling how the updates can be a year apart and introduce next to nothing and require three or four patches to fix the things they broke in the process and fix the bugs that arose from the patch for the patch. The solution is simple: add ships, add weapons, add modules, for **** sake introduce class 3 and 4 railguns. Increase the variety. Introduce specialized ships and modules/weapons that are specialized versions of what already exists if you insist on being lazy. Put NPCs on planets outside of the bubble, generate actual AI to fight and interact with. Don't say it can't be done, modders for space engineers code it for free from their bedrooms. There is a whole pile of EASY EASY crap that could be tapped into but frontier simply refuses to play along and instead insists on polishing that turd of a FPS in the spaceship game. Don't get me wrong, the game is still somewhat fun, but I can only find myself playing with a friend and even then we only ever get an hour or so in before we're off to elsewhere.
/Rant
TL,DR: Game is a senior citizen, lacks any and all variety despite this, easily remedied. Updates and patches introduce more bugs than orkin could handle, outweighing content in totality. Add some fekking ships and bits and guns please.
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